HOW-TO : INCREASE polling window (not decrease it)...

[JoelSnyder]

Folks: Long time listener, first time caller. Big fan of the show. (Yes, I've shown love to the developers.)

I'm building a dashboard which is based on long-term statistics for a customer, and I thought to use Cacti as the basic engine for the dashboard so as to avoid re-inventing the wheel.

In this case, I want to INCREASE the polling window, because the statistics I'm gathering don't make sense at the 5-minute window (such as "number of events of type <X> per hour") and I don't want to stress out the underlying databases I'm querying any more than is necessary. All of my queries are actually scripts; SNMP doesn't come into the picture. So I'd like to slow Cacti down to something like 30-minute polling.

I've read the "how-to" decrease your polling interval posts, and I am tempted to simply change the cron time to 30 minutes, the poller interval to 30 minutes, set my step values to 30*60, my heartbeat to 30*60*2, and build myself some RRAs (I can do math), but my question is: is that all I need to do?

In other words, are there other hidden things inside of Cacti/RRDTool which will mess me up or is this sufficient?

Thanks all...

[cigamit]

RRA, Steps. and Heartbeat should be all that is needed. The poller will still run every 5 minutes, and it will probably spread gathering all your data out over the 30 minute interval. So basically it should be polling some data every 5 minutes, but each individual graph would still only be polling every 30 minutes.

[JoelSnyder]

Cigamit: Thanks for weighing in, I'll give it a try. I didn't see the polls in the log (even though they were there before), which was a bit worrisome, but I figured that out: the log file was re-created by apache, and so the cacti poller couldn't write to it. In any case, I can see the data showing up in the RRD files and they're updating. Might be all done... Thanks! Joel